Thing 13 -- and we're over the hump!

How appropriate that Thing 13 (the "now you're past the half-way mark" activity) should be productivity enhancers.  It also served as a reminder to me to be grateful to my school district (Hopkins, west of MPLS) for already providing its staff with many useful online tools.  Some of which it would behoove Miss Shelved to get to know better.  Well, what better time than the present?

To respond to the prompts:

***Start page?We have had a Google start page for some time, but this was a good time to refurbish and add some of the services the 23 Things folks have introduced.  Useful to have widgets like weather and local gas prices available . . . both of which are behaving immoderately in recent days. It is the #2 page on this computer, since the internet startup is a district page (about which we have no complaints!)

***Useful tool?  Miss Shelved has long been a fan of stickies.  These tend to serve as to-do lists as well as reminders.  Doubtless there would be times when it would be useful to access this information online, or form a different computer.  However, it is at least as likely that the information will be needed when offline.  Miss Shelved will stick (hmmm) with her local stickies for the nonce.  However, MyStickies was a big hit (see below).

***Calendars are a resource for which Miss Shelved must be deeply endebted to her district. We share Entourage calendars with capabilities to schedule, invite, sync, etc.  Upon touring the list of recommended online calendar sites, we decided instead to take an hour (2 as it turned out) to explore our current tool and become a better user.  Adding tags, finally sync-ing in holidays, changing preferences to make better use of invitations -- all should add considerably to one's productivity.  Sometime the best way to learn something new is revisit what you already started.

***To-dos?  We'll stick to stickies.

***Backpack:  What a terrific resource for an ad hoc group. However, for professional groups that supply their staff with computing capability, one would think that such resources would already be shared.  But one could see a group coming together to organize a fundraiser, or a performance, or a slate of PTO meetings using this to link users from many different home or corporate systems.

***What else is good?  Loved Gliffy -- easy creation of flowcharts and floorplans.  See Miss Shelved's "Dream Office"   with grand piano and hot tub.  Ooops:  this was supposed to be productivity enhancement, not time-wasters.  Still, one can dream.  And MyStickies is a neat way to remind oneself why a particular website raised one's interest in the first place. 

Thing 12

Digg and its ilk make one happy to a an elementary librarian. One supposes that a public reference librarian might need to keep up with what the world is reading/viewing/thinking and would find the socially edited "news" sites useful. Admittedly, Miss Shelved does take a periodic peek at Disney, Nickolodeon, and movie trailer sites, for example, to keep up with what the little darlings are talking about. However, one would never confuse keeping a finger on the pulse of mass publicity with being truly informed.

The most worrisome part was the amazing uniformity of the sites , with the same soundbites and images topping the charts. The ease of voting also leads to fears of manipulation -- does ubiquity start to equate to plausibility? What an excellent reminder to get one's real news from a variety of sources. The BBC never headlines the same news as the New York Times -- or the Wall Street Journal, for that matter. And don't simply read those of similar political persuasion. Lowest common denominator news is not likely to expand one's mind.

Thing 11

Oooooh are we loving Del.icio.us! What a terrific way to overcome the limitations of our bookmark bar and the annoyance of perusing "history." Loved the BUTTONS, which will now supercede all new additions on Miss Shelved's button bar. We especially liked (and will introduce to our classroom teachers at summer's end during workshop week) Pagekeeper. At the elementary level, teachers are urged to provide hotlinks rather than have students attempt to type in URLs (with uncontrollable, unintentional and sometimes unfortunate results). At the Media Center, we facilitate this by maintaining a school "links" page which shows up upon internet login. However, teachers fail to request that sites be added, neglect to request that sites be deleted, and often find that the lists have gotten too long to be particularly useful. Pagekeeper is the ideal solution to individualize and quickly update for classroom use.

Thing 10

Point of etiquette: does one place an edit at the beginning or at the end of the page? In the case of an actual wiki article, one assumes there would be a logical organizational outline that would dictate exactly where one would stick in one's oar, as it were. In this case, Miss Shelved has to agree with MysteryLvr (SEE above) that this particular page is less a wiki than a practice page with no real organization to the contributor's comments.

As to the utility of wikis in general, there are situations in which the sharing of knowledge among peers and/or practitioners is pure gold: educational best practices, etymological research, folklore, pop culture, technological troubleshooting, for example. In other cases, say medical research, one might need to be rather more careful in checking the antecedents of shared information. Wikipedia, one gathers, relies on a dedicated cadre of self-appointed citizen editors who work arond the clock to keep the site cleared of misinformation, at least some of which is supplied by well-meaning librarians (a few well-known to Miss Shelved!) who plant articles to prove to their students the unreliability of the source. As in any social network, the key is getting a quorum of authentic contributors and keeping the riff-raff out. (Miss Shelved 7-16-08)

NOTE: This is the edit added to the 23 Things Wiki page

Thing 9

This was somewhat frustrating. Having successfully leapt the hurdles of invitation, there is little instruction to help one to actually open the document in editing mode. Google Doc was fine. Zoho,on the other hand, would allow me to post a comment, or copy the document into a personal file and edit it. But the document would open (from the 23 things link) with no editing and few options. Following a link to "sign in now" (again . . .) allows one to search for a document, but "23-things-practice-document" was not to be found.

Still, it was a particularly fine exercise -- on this beautiful day after the 4th of July -- to work at editing the Declaration of Independence. One must note, however, the limitations of team efforts. Having had the privilege (?) of working on several committees responsible for "mission statements," one acknowledges that through two or more heads may be better than none, such efforts do not lend themselves to felicity of expression. One suspects Thomas Jefferson would have been horrified to have had the rest of the "team" offering their emendations and suggestions. Having Adams and Franklin breathing down his neck was probably annoyance enough on the day.

If one may also comment on the level of glee evinced by some of the editors (and the disapproval of others), Time Magazine offers a wonderful article on Mark Twain this week, and includes a telling quotation that is most apropos: "A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty." Lets keep the giggles coming, shall we?

More Thing 8 -- Everglades Slideshow (Picturetrail)

Thing 8

This is a work in progress.

My slideshow (on Thumbstacks) is available at:

My 23 Things Show

My photo slideshow is above (Thing 8 continued)

My database (all of three entries to start) is at:

Books I Have Read

Perusing this assignment left Miss Shelved with the smug feeling that, to a great extent, we had "been there, done that." Our districtwide server's capacity for sharing is extensively used to share photos, slideshows, databases, and documents among colleagues. Then, when attempting to pull up some archived photos it came to our attention that the district server is down --and likely to be so for much of the summer--for upgrades. Ah, yes, there is a great deal to be said for saving to the web. Necessity is the mother of invention. To the prompts:

• Use for these tools? Photo slideshows are fast becoming a tradition for graduations, retirements, etc. Indeed, such products as PictureTrail raise the bar for the poor Media Specialist who can surely (in her ample free time) womp up several of these imaginative little entertainments each spring. One supposes if it must be done, these tools make it easier. The slide sharer used (Thumbstacks) was somewhat balky. Sharing presentations is often a necessity -- but it would be preferable to be able to share ones already created with more user friendly software. Surely, presentations are rarely prepared (at least at this presenter's level) with the forethought of sharing. As for databases, the same would hold true: one creates a database for personal or team use rather than assuming it needs to be public. Lazybase does allow one to upload an existing database, but Miss Shelved could not try that method since her district server (where such things reside) is down.
• Ease of navigation? Thumbstacks lacked basic instructions and relies heavily on right clicks -- an initial stumble and ongoing annoyance for the Apple user. Also, items carefully and artistically laid out on a slide do not stay in place and look sloppy in presentation. Picturetrail, on the other hand, was very easy (though adding pictures was time-consuming). Lazybase was okay. The ePortfolio site was the most interesting: clearly on-line resumes and portfolios will be the norm.
• Would you recommend? Maybe Picturetrail. Certainly ePortfolio.
• DO you use other sharing tools? Yes: our district has had Moodle pages for a few years now. These are designed for on-line courses, but different teachers use them in different ways to share information, photos, blogs, calendars, etc. with students, colleagues and parents. Moodle is useful, but could also be more flexible and easy to use. Adding a photo, for example, requires a good few too many steps, IMHO!